Chicago Public Media CEO Melissa Bell is Leading the Nation’s Most Watched Local News Experiment

Sure. I mentioned earlier that I think distribution is part of the challenge and I think public media has always served both as great creators of journalism and as stewards of infrastructure.

We are stewards of radio and broadcast signals and we need to state that, in this day and age, we also need to be stewards of digital infrastructure.

I think one of my biggest regrets or frustrations of the last 15 years is that we really seeded digital connection and convening to for-profit technology companies that, of course, put a business model above civic infrastructure and civic discourse and that we did so at peril, at our own peril.

I think that we’ve seen a rise in people using social media. I think the latest, it might have been from one of your studies, Tim, that 69% of adults in Chicago say that they get their news from social media, but they’re frustrated with it.

They find it toxic; they find it not enjoyable to use.

I think a large part of that is because we’re not really thinking about the human connection.

We know from research too that we’ve seen a huge rise in teenage depression and anxiety and suicide rates. And my concern is that the answer coming out of Silicon Valley is, “Let’s make people have a friend, an AI agent friend,” and that’s not the dystopian future I want for my child.

I want us to really think about how we can say we need to care about public digital infrastructure as much as we do the public journalism that we create.

Chicago.com is our experiment to see if we can start rebuilding people’s online experience from the ground up. We really want to start at the neighborhood level in Chicago.

We’re partnering with this great nonprofit called New Public that has built out a technology platform called Roundabout, but it’s so much more than a platform.

It’s really based on research about how you help the people who are moderating conversations online and how you support them so that they can support their neighborhood, their community.

So it starts with the people. We’re centering people at the heart of all of it and we’re helping them find ways to connect to journalism, to resources in the city, like other civic institutions, to local businesses.

We’re really trying to think about how to create a space for healthy, non-toxic conversation.

We’re starting in five neighborhoods in Chicago. We just announced this a few days ago. We’re going to be in Evanston, Avondale, South Shore, Bronzeville and Edgewater.

We are working with paid moderators, which is very different from a lot of other technology companies.

We spent a lot of time looking for these folks. They are not journalists. They’re not part of the newsroom. They are civic activists. Some of them may have been moderators on Facebook groups but grew disenchanted with the platform.

They are very actively engaged in their communities. One’s an urban planner, but wants to help create a healthy space for conversation.

We also think of this as an opportunity not just for Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ, but really for Chicago as a whole. We want this to be a platform we steward, but not just for our own purposes.

We’re hoping to have other partners in the nonprofit news organizations across the city. We have a really rich media ecosystem in Chicago. We want to make sure that we’re raising up those voices.

We also are partnering with other civic institutions across the city and thinking about how we can help the Chicago Public Library System get information more directly to neighborhoods.

And that’s really fun for me because it feels like we can create a really rich information ecosystem for people who live in Chicago and work in Chicago and want to build their best life here and also make Chicago the best city for themselves.

Melissa Bell